The Ballad of Arthur and Jessica
by DesertScribe
Summary: Young Arthur Bailey wins a goldfish at the school fair and slowly grows up as the world not so slowly goes to hell around him.


**Note:** I'm reposting this story from my AO3 account. It was originally posted on 10-1-2017.

* * *

 **The Ballad of Arthur and Jessica**

* * *

The game at the school fair costs one ticket to play, and Arthur's parents are too busy arguing with each other to tell him 'no,' so he plunks his last ticket on the table before they can notice what he's doing, lands the ping pong ball in a cup on the first try, and wins himself a goldfish. By the time the fair volunteer has handed over his prize, he's already named her Jessica. His parents are annoyed when they get home and finally realize that he has a fish with him, but they figure she'll be dead within the week like most carnival game goldfish, so they decide against driving back to the school to make him return her.

Arthur keeps Jessica in bucket for the first night, then skips buying lunch at school the next day and instead uses the money to get her a fishbowl. He follows the blurry printed instructions he was given when he won her. He feeds her a tiny pinch of flaked fish food every day when he gets up in the morning and another tiny pinch before he goes to bed at night. He changes her water every day. He checks out books about fish from the school library, and when he reads that a goldfish should have a lot more space than just a gallon sized fishbowl, he takes the allowance money that he has been saving for one of those really cool giant water guns and instead uses it to buy a fishtank complete with a filter, an air bubble stone, plants, fancy colored gravel, and a skeleton decoration. As far as Arthur is concerned, Jessica is the best pet he could ever ask for and is totally worth it. He loves watching her swim around in her new home.

Much to Arthur's parents' surprise, Jessica lives past the end of the week and keeps going strong. She outlives Arthur's time in elementary school. She outlasts his parents' marriage. She lasts through his whole time in junior high, and according to the books he'd read, they could still maybe have decades more together if he keeps taking good care of her. Arthur is still too young to really comprehend living for that long of a time, and he knows a goldfish isn't smart enough to understand it either, but still it's awesome to think about. And maybe he is only imagining it, but by now she seems to be able to recognize him through the glass, because she swims around more excitedly when he is nearby than when anyone else approaches the tank while he is standing farther away.

The California droughts get worse. Water restrictions move beyond simple bans on watering lawns and washing cars with running hoses. Now, in order to be able to keep changing Jessica's fishtank water as often as he should, Arthur needs to cut back in other areas of his water usage. However, like many teenage boys, Arthur is fine with skipping a few showers per week, so it doesn't really seem like a sacrifice at all.

Then, late in Arthur's freshman year of high school, he comes home from school one day and sees that Jessica's tank is empty, not just devoid of his beloved pet, but of water too. His dad doesn't even try to cover it with a lie that the neighbor's cat got in through an open window or that he found Jessica floating on the surface and took care of her body so that Arthur wouldn't have to. He just says, "Those bastards tightened the water rationing again, and we wouldn't have been able to afford keeping her. Now man up, get on with your life, and take this for the life lesson that it is." When Arthur demands to know exactly what kind of a lesson he is supposed to learn, his dad refuses to elaborate and says that Arthur will figure it out when he's smart enough.

Arthur rages at the unfairness of it, but he knows that it's too late to get Jessica back. He has no choice but to do as his dad instructed and get on with his life, even if the only lesson he can see in the situation is that mom had been right all those times she'd called dad an asshole. Arthur has already known that one for years anyway.

A couple more years go by, and the whole country gets drier. Water rations get tightened some more. Arthur doesn't think about Jessica as much as he used to. Water rations get tightened even further. Then, the Scar happens, and the population of Los Angeles more than doubles in less than a month as refugees pour in from the Midwest, and the strain on the city's shrinking water reserves more than double along with it. The situation in the city is volatile but holds steady for a little while, until summer comes with a vengeance. There's no cool June Gloom for Los Angeles this year, just sweltering heat from the very beginning, and when the big heatwave strikes, ratcheting the already high temperatures even higher, the riots start. There's nothing Arthur can do about any of it.

Then, Arthur's dad doesn't come home one day. He doesn't come home the next day either, nor the day after that. Arthur keeps himself going for as long as he can, but by that point his crappy part-time job had closed its doors months ago, and he can't find another one, no matter how hard he tries. Everyone is more interested in hunkering down and staying alive than taking on new employees, especially not some overgrown kid still a year away from getting his high school diploma. After a couple of weeks, every scrap of food in the house is gone, as are Arthur's meager savings, and his dad still hasn't returned. Arthur tries calling around police stations and hospitals, but the few places that bother answering their phones are too swamped by the chaos to figure out if they've processed a Mr. Bailey or any John Does matching his description lately or not.

Arthur wants to think that maybe his dad has just ditched him, that he picked up and moved to some other city where there is still enough water to grow a little bit of green, like mom had done after the divorce, back when gas was still cheap enough for people to drive across country without going broke. Maybe he's taken off driving to a new life without coming back for his clothes or his appliances or his son because it's better to travel light. Maybe someday he'll call and ask Arthur to come join him. The less optimistic part of Arthur's brain whispers that maybe his dad died in the riots. Arthur has no way of knowing which is true, just like he'd never been able to get his dad to say whether he had thrown Jessica in as part of the deal when he sold her water or if he'd just thrown her away afterwards.

Maybe that is the lesson his dad had wanted him to take from Jessica, that sometimes the people in your life who you think are yours forever can disappear in an instant and you'll never know what happened to them. If that is true, Arthur thinks, then he should deal with his current situation by following the rest of his dad's advice. It's time for him to man up, ignore the disappointment, and get on with his life. With that in mind, Arthur digs around until he finds his dad's old gun and some bolt cutters. A boy's got to eat, especially one as big as Arthur is since his last growth spurt. If he wants to survive, then he is going to need to get food by whatever means necessary, and he knows of a couple of storage locations nearby that don't look like they keep any guards onsite.

He can do this.

Everything is going to be fine.

 **The End**


End file.
